In the Cohen household, Penn is prominent – they named their dog Penni!

Penni Cohen looks sweet in this purple scarf.

The Cohen bunnies, Quaker and Ben, were excited to celebrate Hanukkah.

Quaker and Ben Cohen celebrating Hanukkah in Los Angeles.

Lisa tells me that Ben (the brown rabbit) is a little chunky, just like his namesake Ben Franklin. And, “Quaker likes the limelight so much (like the real Quaker mascot!!) we could barely get her off the couch and back in the rabbit carrier.”

Finally, here are my “angels,” as we affectionately call them when they’re running around the house barking at the possum in our yard. Standing in line at the mall with a bunch of other dogs around was a bit overstimulating, so I’m amazed they were able to sit still for this photo with Santa. Koa and Lau Lau are trying to be on their best behavior so that they’ll be on Santa’s Nice list.

Since it is that time of year – a time of wonder and joy, a time of hope and miracles – I wanted to highlight some of the wonderful research and symposia that the University of Pennsylvania has shared with the world this year.

During this time, I wish you and your loved ones a wonderful holiday season and fantastic 2013.

Penn Medicine research that was presented at the 2012 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) shows that an anti-tau treatment called epithilone D (EpoD) was effective in preventing and intervening the progress of Alzheimer’s disease in animal models, improving neuron function and cognition, as well as decreasing tau pathology.

First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden visited Penn Nursing this April for “Nursing, Veterans, and PTSD,” part of a national program charging nurses to identify, treat, and conduct research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They announced a major initiative by more than 150 of America’s leading nursing organizations and more than 450 nursing schools to ensure our nation’s nurses are prepared to help meet the unique health needs of service members, veterans, and their families.

Attention to PTSD is a significant component of Joining Forces, the First Lady and Dr. Biden’s project created to champion wellness, education, and employment among military service members and their families. PTSD is a serious and widespread anxiety disorder affecting veterans, and the symptoms can be terrifying.

8.Penn Researchers Show Relationship with Working Dogs Protect Handlers from PTSD

Melissa Hunt, the associate director of the clinical training program in the School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has long been interested in this dynamic as it relates to people and their pets. But a chance encounter propelled her to study it in an extreme case: search-and-rescue dogs and their handlers. “Search-and-rescue dogs are not just pets; they’re partners,” Hunt said, meaning this dynamic is even stronger — and the stakes even higher — for people who work with animals.

For more information about Melissa Hunt’s research, please read the Penn Newspress release.

“Radial artery access is the primary mode of access for catheterization procedures in Europe, Canada, and Japan, but has not gained widespread acceptance in the United States, possibly stemming from concerns about increases in procedure time, radiation exposure, and access failure in patients,” said Matthew D. Mitchell, PhD, senior research analyst in the Center for Evidence-based Practice at Penn Medicine. “This study suggests that the adoption of radial catheterization could be a more viable option for many hospitals and health systems, lowering costs and reducing complications for patients.”

For more information about the findings, visit Penn Medicine’s press release.

6. The Perelman School of Medicine received the largest capital gift during the Making History Campaign to name the Smilow Center for Translational Research

A father and son team, Joel and William Smilow, gave the Perelman School of Medicine the largest capital gift during the Making History campaign to allow doctors to take the findings of medical investigations and put that into practice quickly and effectively. President Amy Gutmann recognizes that “the Smilow Center for Translational Research provides a state-of-the-art environment where eminent physicians, researchers and scientists at Penn Medicine will work side-by-side to advance medical science.”

In addition to the Smilow Center, the Smilow’s gift also establishes the William Smilow Professorship in the field of cardiovascular medicine and the William Smilow Award for Innovation in Clinical Excellence. The exact amount remains undisclosed.

Penn researchers reported in The Lancet that lomitapide, a first-in-class microsomal triglyceride transfer protein (MTP) inhibitor, substantially and stably reduced LDL cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol) in patients with the orphan disease homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HoFH). Lomitapide works by inhibiting MTP, which is required for the production of VLDL — the precursor to LDL.

A rendering of a Low-Density Lipoprotein (LDL) receptor (image courtesy of Wikipedia).

For more on homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia and lomitapide, visit the full press release.

4. The Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships 20th Anniversary

The Netter Centercelebrated its anniversary in November by hosting an international two-day conference examining perspectives on higher education, community development and community health partnerships.

The conference theme was “The Role of Higher Education-Community-School Partnerships in Creating Democratic Communities Locally, Nationally and Globally.” It featured various thematic panels on such topics as education, poverty, health promotion, community engagement and university assisted community schools presented by university presidents, educators, administrators and professionals from across the country.

The event capped off its first night with keynote speaker Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and former president of the United Federation of Teachers. Remarks throughout the conference were given by Dr. Rebecca Bushnell, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences; Craig Carnaroli, Executive Vice President; and Jeffrey Cooper, Vice President, Office of Government and Community Affairs.

The communities of West and South Ambler are working to recover from the ramifications of their town’s long-closed asbestos factory. Residents in these communities remain at risk of environmental exposure and a potentially increased risk of developing mesothelioma, a rare cancer which is caused almost exclusively by exposure to asbestos. Researchers at the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET), Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, have been awarded a $1.2 million grant to develop an educational program using the communities’ history of asbestos products manufacturing and resulting asbestos exposure. Funding for the program is provided by the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA), which is administered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“Our results show that chimeric antigen receptor modified T cells have great promise to improve the treatment of leukemia and lymphoma,” says the trial’s leader, Carl June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Director of Translational Research in Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center. According to Dr. June, “It is possible that in the future, this approach may reduce or replace the need for bone marrow transplantation.”

The 1,000th patient received the transplant on Sunday, December 2, 2012 and is doing well. Celebrating its 25th Anniversary, the Penn Medicine heart transplant program, part of the Penn Transplant Institute’s multi-organ transplant center at HUP, has been at the forefront of medical care and clinical advances in the area of heart failure and heart transplantation, including offering multiple organ transplantation – such as heart-lung and heart-liver transplants.

The program performs more adult heart transplants per year than all other Philadelphia area hospitals combined, making it one of the top three heart transplantation programs in the nation.

For more information about this remarkable milestone, please see Penn Medicine’s full press release.

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Sweeten Alumni House is quite literally a sweet place to work. This holiday season we have been inundated with a plethora of brightly colored packages all bearing delicious temptations. My office is in a strategic location- right next to the copy machine and across from the second-floor counter where all the sweets eventually end up. Thanks to my close proximity, I have been able to document a week of Sweeten’s sweets.

FRIDAY

President Amy Gutmann stays up late into the night to bake cookies for the entire campus. Just kidding, but it was awfully thoughtful of her to send these to us from Famous 4th Street Cookies.

MONDAY

Monday was off to a tasty start with holiday packages from vendors including a popcorn three-way, chocolate-covered pretzels, assorted chocolates, and Scottish shortbread cookies. It ended with even more sweets, when Sweeten hosted a baby shower complete with a chocolate/vanilla marble cake.

TUESDAY

After staff slept off their sugar comas, it was back to work on Tuesday with homemade Christmas cookies from our own Liz Pinnie. Note the beautiful (and delicious) spritz cookies. And what would a day at Sweeten be without chocolaty, peanut-buttery goodness wrapped in colorful holiday foil? With a little help from our work study students, we devoured the entire basket of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups too.

WEDNESDAY

Another delicious popcorn tin followed by a party for December birthdays. Lynn Carroll made cupcakes!

THURSDAY

Thursday was the best treat of all. My little dog, Axl, came to visit in his holiday bandana. He loves visiting campus. Not only is there a lot of green space for him to romp, but there are tons of squirrels to chase. Axl spent his lunch break outside saying hello to passers-by and trying to chase Penn’s furry critters.

FRIDAY and BEYOND

We are all at home with our friends and family, enjoying our own holiday treats and traditions, as I hope, were you. Happy holidays from all of us at Sweeten!

The Penn Alumni Club of Philadelphia recently volunteered at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center. Established in 2007, the Penn Vet Working Dog Center is part of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine and serves as a national research and development center for detection dogs. I first learned about the Penn Vet Working Dog Center from Frankly Penn posts: here and here. I scheduled a group volunteer event for our club members and hoped others loved puppies as much as I do. Little did I know that Penn alumni in Philly LOVE puppies! Our volunteer event filled up in record time of half a day! Here are a few photos from our volunteer event.

Penn alumni playing with puppy Ohlin.

Specifically, we played “pass the puppy” with him.

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We also learned new training techniques with puppy Socks.

With the help of Volunteer & Outreach Coordinator, Pat Kaynaroglu, we got tips about how to help the puppies build their core muscles.

Happy holidays, everyone! I hope you’re having a wonderful time with family and friends and are taking a well-deserved break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

I’m back in my hometown celebrating the holidays with my family, but I wanted to share with you some of holiday cheer I experienced in Philadelphia and elsewhere during December.

In early December, International Student Affairs in the Graduate School of Education (GSE) organized a trip for GSE students to Longwood Gardens in Kenneth Square, PA. I went with some of my classmates and was truly overwhelmed by the beauty and grandeur of the grounds, both outside and inside the conservatory. In the conservatory, because of the history and architecture of the building, I felt as though I had stepped back in time to the Gilded Age or Progressive Era. Pierre du Pont, the famous businessman who purchased the property in the early twentieth century and opened Longwood Gardens to the public, once entertained guests in the conservatory during the holiday season. Many of the decorations in the building referenced that tradition.

Penn’s campus and downtown Philadelphia also displayed a lot of holiday cheer. Below are just a few pictures for you to enjoy.

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I have taken a lot of classes at Penn to this point, but none of them have been like Mechatronics. I have written about this class before, first before it started in “Junior Year is Here” and again in the middle of the “MEAMpocalypse 2012.” Last Tuesday, the class came to an end, with our final project culminating in the public tournament of Robockey. There was a nice Philly Inquirer article about that night. Sadly, our team was on the losing end of the “bloodbath” described in the article, but by the end of the project our team had done pretty well, making it into the Champions bracket (top 10 out of 17 teams). But what set this class apart was what I experienced when it was over.

Coming back into the Engineering Quad a few days later, I was confronted with the sight of an empty space where the practice rink had been for the past month. And instantly, I was hit with a flood of emotion. It then dawned on me how much of my life I had spent sitting around that rink, working on our robots. And that event, which had been the majority of my life for such a long time, was finally gone. Behind that space is the GM Lab, where we did the majority of the circuit work and fabrication of the robots, and I had the same emotional rush facing that room. I had spent so much time there, and yet it was over. It was like a piece of me had been torn out, a piece that I will never forget, but also a piece that will never be quite the same again.

But the emotional response did not end there. For a few nights after the conclusion of the project, I had trouble getting to sleep, because my brain was thinking about Mechatronics. I wanted to go back and keep working on Robockey. Perhaps my brain was used to this behavior, as after long nights in the lab I would often think about roadblocks I had encountered as I dozed off to sleep, and managed to solve a large number of problems during those uninhibited thinking periods. But now it was all for naught, as there was nothing more I could do to work on these robots. There was no more rink, no more pucks, no more crowds and late nights.

Needless to say, no other class has ever made me feel this way before. I have never put as much heart and soul into anything before, and now the fact that it has been taken away from me is painful. I am sure that as I move forward with my Penn career, this hole will begin to heal. I will look back on the class fondly, as even with its late nights and tough problems, this class made an impact on my life. From now on, every time I pass the GM lab I will think of Mechatronics. I have signed up to potentially be a TA for this course next year, and I am sure that if I am selected, I will experience these emotions again when the class starts up again next fall. And next December, when the practice rink returns to its home outside the GM lab and teams start occupying it 24/7 again, I will be reminded of all the memories and all of the work I put in. Mechatronics has changed me, and I am interested to see if any other class has that kind of power in the future.

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Check out Spruce Street Plaza between 33rd and 34th on Spruce Street. The old parking lot across from HUP that once housed food carts has been transformed into Penn’s latest public green space. A great new place to enjoy lunch or just get some fresh air.